Authors: Lynne Segal
Of course, one of the problems about aspirations for bridging generational divides comes from the way in which generations are falsely homogenized in the first place. Cross-generational ties can appear or disappear, sometimes fleetingly, in other situations, leaving their mark across a lifetime. However, it is only when we return to the distinctiveness of particular affiliations, aspirations or struggles in specific times and places that we can understand how unexpected bonds can sometimes be forged, perhaps according to the sudden interests and needs of the moment, or else flowing from more enduring familial or other bonding relationships. I suggested earlier that in some ways people become more rather than less different from each other with the accumulation of time, especially in the manner in
which we handle the apparently shared fears and difficulties of facing old age and death. This is just one reason why it can be harder to form new ties, even amongst our own peers, let alone across generations, as we age. It is something Auden, that poet so sensitive to the desires of the human heart, encapsulated with characteristic evocative exaggeration: ‘At twenty we find our friends for ourselves, but it takes Heaven / To find us one when we are fifty-seven’.
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It is often possible to detect, or at least for others sometimes to perceive, how the frustrations, humiliations, guilt, losses and abandonments of the past live on to haunt and disrupt our connections to others in the present. This is of course at the heart of psychoanalytic thought and practice, which is why embarking upon analytic treatment can prove painful, especially in the early years of analysis. Discussing conscious states of memory in her reflections on ageing, Jane Miller comments on the persistence of negative experiences: ‘I am especially puzzled that memory is much better at unhappiness than happiness.’
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It is a depressing thought, though clearly we do also retain memories of happy times, especially when they are invoked by those with whom we shared them. However, a slightly different question nags at me, which I hope to explore further in subsequent chapters: can the recognition, status, pleasures and satisfactions of our remembered past, or perhaps I should say our reconstructions of what we once had or achieved, sustain us in later life, as times change and the rewards of the present often become more elusive? Or do the satisfactions of the past serve more to magnify and mock whatever might be felt as the losses and limitations in the ageing present? I am not yet at all sure of the answer, and sometimes rather compelled by Robert Frost’s lines in ‘Provide, Provide’: ‘No memory of having
starred / Atones for later disregard, / Or keeps the end from being hard’.
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Quite how hard, manageable, or at times, in the words of another prescient poet, Seamus Heaney, ‘still vulnerable to delight’, the process of ageing can be is something I hope to elucidate when pondering more closely how others have reflected upon the most intimate dilemmas of ageing. However, I feel I can say already that despite the inevitable tensions, being able to retain certain ties and affiliations across generations, without too much envy, bitterness or sense of exclusion and loss, usually has something to do with how successfully we manage old age.
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The Perils of Desire
Understanding across the generations may indeed help us see old age as more of a gift than a shipwreck, but contradictions remain. ‘Life becomes progressively stranger as we get older – and we become increasingly frantic to keep it familiar, to keep it in order’, wrote the erudite psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
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However varied our experiences of ageing, this attempt to recognize ourselves as in some sense still the same person we always have been is certainly one of the challenges of old age. Nowhere is this task more fraught than in matters of sex and intimacy, where distinctly gendered apprehensions arise. We have seen already that for many, and certainly for most feminists, it is women who, first and last, have more reason to fear and lament the frustrations and deprivations they encounter with ageing. Women have written movingly, and often, of the many ways in which they are marginalized and diminished when youthful looks depart. Yet several voices, and not only male, have suggested that old age torments men more than women.
Ageing may be part of the human condition, but every statistic bears out the truism that the double standards of ageing mean women are judged to enter middle and old age far earlier than men. Accordingly, in the media generally, older men are
represented significantly more often than older women. Indeed, in 2010 in the UK, the fifty-two-year-old TV presenter, Miriam O’Reilly, was the first employee to successfully sue the BBC for ageism, after she was dropped from their series
Countryfile
, together with other middle-aged female presenters. As she protested, men decades older than her were still regularly appearing on this and similar programmes. She won her case, yet subsequently still felt obliged to change career. Reflecting on this, one of Britain’s indisputably aged female media crusaders, Katharine Whitehorn, mentioned ‘the lopsided mirror to life’, in which only men are allowed to grow old on screen.
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Similarly, surveying decades of mainstream film in the USA, Elizabeth Markson and Carol Taylor analysed a sample of over 3,000 motion pictures made between the 1930s and 1990s, finding little change in the way in which leading older actors were portrayed throughout those years. Older men’s roles were likely to play down signs of physical ageing, portraying elderly male actors as vigorous and engaged with the world (whether as heroes or villains), while the opposite was the case for older female figures, if and when they did appear.
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Such information makes it all the more striking that what scholarly literature there is specifically addressing masculinity and ageing has tended to emphasize men’s relatively greater miseries heading towards mid-life and coping with old age.
Just Like a Woman
‘What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man?’
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The first person who officially posed this question on behalf of men was not in fact a man, but that woman
who keeps appearing in these pages, Simone de Beauvoir. Surprisingly, in her book
La Vieillesse
(
The Coming of Age
), published when she was sixty-three, Beauvoir said very little about women in old age, focusing primarily on the experiences of men. She concentrated on men because she was convinced that it was men, not women, who suffered most from growing old, and she held this view both despite, and also because of, the feminism she by then espoused.
In her view, men suffered more because the ageing process in most men, particularly after retirement, reduced them to the situation she had earlier scrutinized in
The Second Sex
, the situation of a woman: that of being rendered an object, denied agency in the world. What is significant about ageing, she felt, was not just that Western societies so readily refuse to acknowledge it other than as a problem to be avoided, but that it changes our relation to time. For as we age, the weight of the past must be measured and valued in comparison with the increasing flimsiness of any certainties about our future. However, she argued, modern societies, which train us to be always future-oriented and profit producing, fail to recognize as fully human those who have a far stronger sense of their extensive past than of how they should relate to their much shorter future. In her view, the ageing man, when he loses his power, ‘becomes, and to a far greater extent than a woman, a mere object. She is necessary to society, whereas he is of no worth at all’ (89).
Illustrating her argument with quotations from interviews with mostly retired working-class men, in various cities of Europe and the USA in the late 1960s, she notes the boredom and humiliation that many felt when they were no longer wage-earners: ‘Life’s not worth living once you’ve retired’; ‘I give her [the wife] less than nothing – I’m ashamed.’ Such accounts
led Beauvoir to conclude: ‘From one day to the next domestic tyrants may become so timid that they no longer cut a slice of bread without asking permission. Others sink into hypochondria’ (268). In contrast, she believed that older women usually continued to be more involved with their children and grandchildren, just as they had been before, and were used ‘to living for and by means of others’: ‘Age does not bring women down from such a height; there are more things they can still do; and not being so embittered, so demanding, they “uncommit” themselves less’ (475).
Again in the sexual arena, developing a theme we will soon see dominating much of the ageing literature on men by men over the last few decades, Beauvoir explored men’s narcissistic trauma over their waning and unpredictable sexual performance. She provided evidence to suggest that neither men nor women lose their sexual interests as they age, finding affirmations of ageing desire not so hard to uncover, though they may be differently expressed in line with gendered practices. In Beauvoir’s view, older women take as much pleasure in sexuality as younger ones, while physiologically women experience fewer problems because they can always find sexual pleasure one way or another, if properly stimulated. Men’s huge anxieties over their faltering erectile capacities as they age therefore have far greater force than women’s fears of sexual failure.
A woman, Beauvoir noted, will ‘identify herself with the total image of her body from childhood on, [whereas] the little boy sees his penis as an
alter ego
; it is in his penis that his whole life as a man finds its image, and it is here that he finds himself in peril’ (321). Imperilled, indeed, as we will soon be hearing men lament and the experts of psychological wellbeing testify. In Beauvoir’s analysis, the dangers women face arise not from the
waning of desire or ability, but from the psychological effects of rejection. Beauvoir was all too well aware that an older woman is likely to be dismissed as an object of desire by men because of her body’s ageing, often experiencing intense shame in the process, when at the first sign of coldness from a man ‘she feels her ugliness in all its horror, she is disgusted at her image and cannot bear to expose her poor person to others’ (349).
Beauvoir, however, is far from the only writer to sense a particular crisis for men in relation to ageing. Indeed, the Canadian psychoanalyst and organizational psychologist, Elliott Jaques, coined the term ‘mid-life crisis’ almost fifty years ago to describe the anxieties of the ageing man.
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He, and other clinicians and writers since, have made the notion of mid-life crisis almost synonymous with the situation of ageing men in Western societies, using it to describe the shorter or longer periods of dramatic self-doubt, anxiety and worthlessness that some, maybe many, men feel with the passing of their youth and the imminence of old age. Indeed, with the emergence of Men’s Studies in the 1980s, researchers had begun highlighting all the difficulties men face in trying to establish and maintain their identities as ‘men’, when notions of ‘masculinity’ are supposed to ensure they emerge as the socially dominant, tougher sex.
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In this literature, the challenges men face are seen as beginning early. One way or another, a boy has to renounce his first attachment to and dependency on his mother if he is to assume an acceptable form of masculinity, suggesting strength, independence, dominance, and above all the ability to be in control of his own life – a journey requiring displays of what may prove somewhat thin layers of bravado and competence.
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However, the whole performance can of course become much harder, if
not break down altogether, as a man ages, at least if or when his ageing is accompanied by obvious losses of financial and other forms of power and authority.
This is exactly what Susan Faludi – one of many to survey the process of men’s sense of growing decline in the late-twentieth-century USA – reported in her book
Stiffed
.
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Her compatriot, Gullette, has also pointed out that in recent decades men’s traditional patriarchal privileges have been further eroded in the USA. Once it was the case that men, though not women, found that their wages kept on increasing until late middle age. However, the emergence of turbo-charged capitalism in recent decades has meant the years after early middle age are increasingly seen in terms of ‘obsolescence rather than experience’, undermining the workplace seniority and security that once privileged white, middle-class men – skilled working-class men had already lost this age status privilege in the 1980s. After mid-life, Gullette’s figures also indicate, men are the most dramatic losers in ongoing age battles.
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This specific context adds to the reasons more scholars and clinicians are suggesting that some level of male crisis has become nearly inevitable for the ageing man.
The Harder They Fall
Meanwhile, rather differently, although reiterating Beauvoir and many others on the topic, the latest clinical literature includes an ever-greater emphasis on the apparent ‘narcissistic mortification’ accompanying the ageing man’s failure to control the very thing that remains enduringly emblematic of his masculinity across time and place – the erect penis. Masculinity and
the functioning penis are symbolically inseparable, the penis as substituting for the man, a truth condensed into the metaphor and iconography of ‘impotence’. It is the commercial amplification of this symbolic doubling that has recently also fuelled the extraordinary level of medicalization and commodification of the ageing male body, most dramatically since 1998, with the mass marketing of Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs. The virile nirvana promised by pharmaceutical companies is that, whatever his age, a man can retain the sexual capacities of his youth and indeed must do so if age is not to destroy his masculinity.
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